E-Media Tidbits

It's that time of year again! There's just a couple more weeks until the deadline for the third annual round of Knight News Challenge grants, for experimental digital media projects that build or bind a sense of geographic community.

Applications must be submitted by Nov. 1, 2008 -- and absolutely anyone, anywhere can apply.

But there's a good reason to start drafting your  application now, if you haven't done so already: You probably need help thinking your application through. Even if you think you don't need help, believe me: You do.

Fortunately, News Challenge has lots of help to offer applicants...

A couple weeks ago I blogged the 5 Stages of a Blogger's Life cartoon. (The concept for this cartoon was mine, and Alex Hughes created the artwork.) This was an experiment to test a theory of mine: that cartoons could be particularly successful in increasing news site traffic -- and that news organizations should do more with cartoons.

The results? In one week that cartoon got over 40,000 hits -- making it the most popular post ever on my Online Journalism Blog.

Here's why: Cartoons are close to a universal language. You need not read English to understand them. Cartoons, therefore, are a good strategy to attract a global audience...

When your environment is changing radically and fast, the attitude with which you approach that change can make all the difference in whether you thrive, survive, or keel over. For journalists, that can mean taking the future of the news business (emphasis intended) into their own hands.

That point has rarely been made more clearly than in a recent exchange that digital media entrepreneur Elizabeth Osder had with students at USC's Annenberg School of Journalism...

For any topic or event you might cover, all kinds of people will be posting all kinds of content about it in many places. Exploring such related content is useful not only to journalists who follow beats or stories, but also to their audiences and communities. The trick is to gather it all together into one place, and to filter it so that you only see what's truly relevant.

This morning I built my very first Yahoo Pipe. It's collecting posts, tweets, images, videos, and news related to the Society of Environmental Journalists 2008 conference, which is happening next week in Roanoke, VA. (Be kind, it's a work in progress. Helps to view it in list format, rather than the default image format. )

Here's what I learned from the experience, and how I think journalists can benefit from learning to build Yahoo Pipes..

For live event coverage, more and more people turn to their TVs and computers simultaneously. This is especially true for political coverage -- and you could really see it in action during last night's presidential debate. A team of journalists from Politifact and the St. Petersburg Times used Twitter to provide live factual backgrounding for some of the candidates' statements during the debate. Lots of Twitter users followed this action, and many responded to or expanded this conversation. Meanwhile, NPR enlisted Twitter users to help fact-check their debate coverage.

This morning I spoke to one of the founders of Politifact, news technologist Matthew Waite, about his experience. Listen to this audio interview...

Newstrust, the online community that rates the quality of mainstream an independent news stories, just debuted several new features with its site redesign. I'll confess that until now I hadn't explored this site much because it seemed too cluttered and involved too much of a learning curve. But with the redesign, I think it's much more inviting and accessible.

Here are a few new features I find especially intriguing...